Chapter Four
"Jesus!" Scott swore into every open channel they had. "Virgil, report!"
All alarms built into Two roared to life as lightning enveloped her in its wicked embrace. Blinded, his hands gripped the yoke as Virgil blinked and blinked trying to see. A full minute of cacophony and then suddenly silence rushed into the cockpit as though he'd been swallowed beneath the surface of the placid ocean surrounding their island paradise. His ears popped.
"Hang on!" he shouted, fingers flying everywhere at once as he checked, rechecked, triple-checked, started diagnostics, flipped every chart, graph and readout screen online and scanned numbers, words, letters, reports.
"Virgil!" Scott barked.
"This is John. Other than getting tossed around, I'm FAB."
"Gordon from the pod. We're all okay; luckily our patients were strapped into their beds."
"Virg?"
"Systems show green," Virgil finally responded, though he knew the disbelief in his voice wouldn't be lost on his eldest brother.
"Thunderbird One to Alan, report!"
"What the hell just happened up there? You tryin' to kill me?"
"Not this time," Virgil replied, tamping down the fear, forcing his voice to its even, dulcet tones. Every other second he was pushing another button, twisting another dial, reading another diagnostic on one of the multiple screens before him. And none of it made sense.
"Lightning," Scott advised. Then added, "I think."
"You think?" John's voice held no small trace of sarcasm.
"It was blinding," Scott added, and his own tone was enough to make the hairs on the back of Virgil's neck stand on end.
"I've got the victim strapped into the second harness," Alan reported, "but…"
"But what?" Virgil asked as he checked the primary winch's standalone operating system for the fifth time. No way was he going to let John turn that baby on unless he knew for sure it'd reel his little brother in safely.
"Well, she's…I mean, she's not…"
"Alan?" Scott prompted.
Big brother voice, Virgil noted when the Winch Operating System gave him green lights across the board. "Okay on the winch, John."
"FAB. Ready, Al?"
"Ready."
His voice sounded steady. Strong. Yet…unsure, somehow.
Odd.
"Status of the victim."
"She got knocked out by a piece of debris, Scott, but I think she's—oh, shit! Wave! John, get us up now, now, now!"
"What the—?"
"Starting winch!"
"Faster! Haul fucking ass!"
"Damn it!"
"Alan, what is—oh, my God."
"Scott? What?" The hairs on Virgil's entire body were now standing on end.
"Twenty degrees starboard!"
Virgil swung Two's powerful spotlight to those precise coordinates and felt his jaw drop. "My God," he whispered.
A wall of black was headed their way.
Headed Alan's way.
"Vertical ascent, Virgil, hurry! Alan, hang on!" Scott ordered.
Out of his peripheral vision, Virgil saw One's VTOL roar to life, the 'bird rising vertically so fast that it was out of sight before he could blink. Two's four VTOLs ignited.
"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Alan cried out. "You're gonna burn us to death!"
"John, stop the winch! Alan, hold on!" Virgil yelled as he jabbed the button that shut the VTOLs off, then started Two's powerful antigravity device. He pulled back on the yoke so hard it banged against his ribs.
It was all he could do without killing Alan and the woman outright.
Two's spatial, antigrav failure and lift warnings sliced through the air like white-hot swords, piercing his eardrums as he fought to keep her level in the winds that buffeted Two like she was made of paper mache. Mentally going through a dozen calculations for how to get Alan and the woman above the wave in time, his heart raced as fast as his mind.
"Faster!" Alan cried out, pure fear punctuating the electrified atmosphere in the cockpit. Virgil used every ounce of strength and control he had to keep the great green transporter from tilting as she climbed far faster than she'd ever been designed to using nothing but the antigravs.
"Higher," he heard Scott mutter somewhere on the periphery of his consciousness.
Virgil slammed the butt of his left hand down to silence the alarms. He lost a good layer of enamel as his teeth ground together, sweat covering nearly every inch of exposed skin and starting to soak through his uniform. Two protested, shaking so violently that Virgil wondered if she wouldn't just come apart at the seams.
Rising to his feet, Virgil's arms strained, muscles bulging, lips in a tight, thin line as he pulled back while Two tried correcting and slowing – she'd only ever used antigrav for landings and takeoffs, not for rapid ascent. "No, baby, come on, do what I say, come on," he hissed through his teeth and then just like that, it was over.
"Alan's clear!" Scott shouted.
Virgil collapsed into the pilot's chair, slowly easing the yoke forward. Two stopped shaking and the familiar whine of her jet engines settled back into the atmosphere. There, floating high above swirling gray-black clouds, everything suddenly seemed so peaceful, as though what had just happened, hadn't.
"Alan?" John said. Virgil could well imagine he was looking down through the open hatch trying for a visual.
There was no response.
"I can't see him!" Virgil heard the ramped-up adrenaline coursing through Scott's veins in his voice as though it produced some sort of discordant harmony that laced every word he spoke. "Damn it, hold on!"
A bright swath of light appearing to the right told Virgil that Scott had activated One's spotlight.
"Where is he?" John asked. "Virg, gimme the rear pod spot!"
Virgil flicked a switch to his left. "You have control."
"Swing it back," Scott suggested as his own light made a search out of concentric circles beneath Two's belly.
Silence.
Dead silence.
"Guys? A little help down here?"
Virgil closed his eyes and took in a breath he hadn't been aware of denying himself.
"Alan," Scott breathed. "Report."
"You did that on purpose," John groused, but Virgil could hear relief hiding beneath sarcasm.
"Hardly," Alan replied, sounding tired. Oh, so tired. "We got tangled harness to cable and my 'com was out for a sec. Electrical short. Took a bit for the redundancy to kick in."
"Can I finally winch you up?"
"Yeah, assuming there aren't even bigger waves headed our way."
"All the way up here?" John asked incredulously.
"Hey, after all the shit we've seen, I take nothing for granted," was Alan's reply.
"How does a wave that large form out here in the plains?" Virgil wondered.
"That sucker was twice as tall as the building Alan was standing on," Scott said, finally able to exhale enough to string a sentence together. "I don't know."
"It almost swallowed me and this lady like Jonah's whale," Alan remarked, a small edge of amusement draining the last of tension from Virgil's body. "There's just one thing."
"What's that?" John asked as Virgil watched the winch monitor count down the number of feet left until Alan reached the safety of the hatch.
"You're going to tell me it's because I'm traumatized after that Cirque du Soleil stunt Virg just pulled, but…I would swear to you on a stack of Grandma's apple pies that this isn't the same woman I winched down there to save."
Scott's voice was laced with concern. "What do you mean? There was only one life sign, and she was the one I saw climb through the trapdoor."
"I'm not so sure about that," Alan replied.
"Almost up," John interrupted.
"There aren't any other life signs. What makes you think she isn't the woman I saw?"
"Hang on…gotcha," John said.
Virgil heard the buckles of the harness clink as John and Alan opened them.
"Holy crap." This from John.
"What?" Scott asked.
"He's right. This isn't the same woman. When you told us to come join you, that you'd found a victim, you said she was in her seventies."
"Yeah, so?"
Alan grunted, presumably helping John unload the victim. After a swish of squishy wet fabric – the harness being removed, Virgil mentally noted – Alan explained. "Scott, the woman I just brought up to Thunderbird Two is no seventy-something."
Silence filled the airwaves. Broken by Scott's, "What are you talking about? I had Cam A zoomed right in on her face. She couldn't have been more than ten, twenty years younger than Grandma at the most."
"No way," John countered. "Look."
At that moment, Virgil's primary viewscreen came to life. Being held tightly to Alan's chest was an unconscious woman. And her face, though partially hidden against his body, showed them all that both Alan and John were right.
This girl couldn't have been out of her twenties, never mind in her seventies.
"That's not possible," Scott whispered.
Virgil stared at the live feed, watching Alan and John move toward the sliding door that led to the pod. That feed was immediately replaced by Scott's visage.
Scott looked at him.
Virgil looked back.
"That's not who I saw," Scott finally said. He shook his head. "I swear it's not."
Virgil believed his brother. But he also believed his own eyes.
Right now, those two beliefs simply weren't coming together.